Beyond Sustainability / Meta CoCreation

Humantific CoFounders Elizabeth Pastor and GK VanPatter were invited to lead two hours of cross-disciplinary cocreation skill-building exercises with all participants attending the OverLap 2008 Conference in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Overlap is ambitiously advertised by its creators as “an annual, peer-to-peer gathering for those working at the center of emerging theory, methods and practices of innovation.” We found Overlap to be not exactly that (wink, wink), but we had a great day none-the-less.

It was wonderful to see such strong interest in learning more about cross-disciplinary meta cocreation methods even though some Overlappers were obviously determined to remain stuck in individual intutition based approaches. Change is difficult even for some “working at the center of emerging…methods”..:-)

In addition to teaching cross-disciplinary meta cocreation, Humantific brought a central message to OverLap that is often found to be missing from most sustainablity themed books & events: Sustainability is content not process. Sustainability is not a methodology. It is a problem type. Without scalable meta cocreation process skills in the room most sustainablity events turn into very entertaining but not very useful circular conversations. Sustainability is but one of many important problem types that exist in a continously changing world.

Presently meta cocreation process knowledge represents the flip-side of the sustainability movement but this is finally starting to change. As the sustainability movement begins to move beyond problem finding (pointing out problems) and into the more complex terrain of action, cross-disciplinary cocreation process mastery becomes much more important. Unless you are ready to settle for cat fight dynamics, anytime you have multiple stakeholders involved in highly complex problems significant cocreation skills are going to be needed. For more than ten years Humantific team has been working that realization. We have already learned alot!

What was particularily hilarious was to see the same few loud cantankerous voices so strenuously objecting to externalized visible cocreation process at OverLap 08 rushing 180 degrees afterwards to create innovation methods and tools oriented projects! Funny stuff goes on!

Unless you are just starting out and have no codified innovation knowledge, we could not recommend to any of our friends the unfortunately competitive harvesting phenomenon known as Overlap.